THROWBACK THURSDAY

NO SIMPLE REMEDY

For THROWBACK THURSDAY I’m reposting a story I put up last year in April. I know, it seems pretty new, but in reality, I only had 130 subscribers at the time. The reason for writing this story in the first place is, to be fair, heart-breaking.

Some of you know that I came here under bizarre circumstances. I’d been working at my mill job and looking forward to retiring in the beginning of the following year, when there was an accident that resulted in the death of one of my best friends and someone I’d worked with for 44 years. I was devastated, and was told to take time off work and go through therapy and all that other stuff.

I was unable to write. I had no desire to write. I had just started my JACK OF DIAMONDS story on Vocal. and had to get away from there because they were just too ridiculous when it came to PC content and censorship. I’d started that in 2021, sometime in the summertime. The accident happened in January of 2022. I joined Substack in June of 2022 and started posting old stories that I had, figuring that I could post old stories and not have to do anything for about a year. It wasn’t until November of that year that I “forced” myself to start writing. I was going to write a short story. That’s the time I decided I was going to try my hand at the NaNoWriMo challenge. (That’s the NAtionalNOvelWRItingMOnth that takes place every November.) I put my story aside because it wasn’t going anywhere. I started my novel.

I had overextended myself. I was trying to re-post my JACK OF DIAMONDS in an edited version on my Pay ‘Stack, thinking that would be something I could give my PAID subscribers — all 7 of them at the time. I couldn’t keep up with doing that, writing a second novel, and trying to work on a short story that wasn’t going anywhere. I ditched my JACK novel and posted my NaNo book: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL, instead. I put the story aside and told myself I’d get back to it later.

When it was all said and done, it was the new year. I started working on the story. I tossed out everything I’d written before and started fresh. It was the first “short” story I’d written in a long, long time. It ended up a little more than a short story. That’s when I realized I liked to write long stories. That’s when I also realized that maybe I’d taken a turn for the better; that maybe I could go on and reinvent myself. I had broken the 100 subscriber mark. And they were introducing the FOLLOWERS as a “new” step forward. It was something I didn’t fully comprehend.

Fast forward to now. I have 657 Subscribers, and a little over 1000 “followers,” (of whom 32 of that total are PAID Subscribers.) The idea of having paid subscribers was to having stories like this made into “Book-length” novellas and personally mail them to my Subscribers. But, like I said, I only have 32 paying customers and I need a minimum of 75 to be able to afford to pay the costs…so I guess that ain’t happening.

So here you go, because you know in life there’s…NO SIMPLE REMEDY.